The move is intended to help the government meet its target inflation rate of 2% at a time when consumers and businesses are reluctant to spend. But there are plenty of knock-on results that will affect consumers, particularly savers and those approaching retirement.

Annuities

Annuities – the insurance policies which pay out a regular income to people in retirement – have been "in meltdown" for four years, according to Tom McPhail, pensions expert with independent financial adviser Hargreaves Lansdown, and further QE will only make the situation worse.

Annuity rates, which determine the amount of income investors can buy with their pension fund, are based on gilt yields. QE effectively reduces the number of gilts on the market by buying them from banks, insurance and pension companies, and pushes up the price of those that remain, thereby reducing their yields and the amount of annuity income a pensioner can buy.

Annuity rates have fallen from 7.855% for a level income for a 65-year-old man in 2008 to 5.743% in 2012, and in June alone there were 16 annuity rate cuts. This means a man buying an annuity with a £100,000 pension pot would currently get an income of £5,743 a year, almost a third of the £15,600 he would have got when annuity rates peaked in 1990.

There are other factors which affect annuity rates, but QE has a big influence. Insurer MGM Advantage says that in March 2009 when the first round of QE took place, annuity rates were 6.93%. By the following month they had dropped to 6.73%, a big decrease in just one month.

McPhail says: "All other things being equal, we would expect a further fall in gilt yields following an announcement of additional QE, and in a short space of time this would be expected to feed through into lower annuity rates. Again."

Final salary pensions

The UK's final salary pension schemes have huge deficits, standing at £312.1bn at the end of June according to the Pension Protection Fund (PPF). This means the assets within the funds are less than the funds' liabilities – the incomes they have to pay out to present and future pensioners. McPhail says any fall in gilt yields is likely to exacerbate their deficit problems, adding: "According to the PPF, a 0.1% reduction in gilt yields increases scheme liabilities by 1.8%."

This can only increase pressure on final salary schemes at a time when those in the public sector are already undergoing substantial changes and those in the private sector are being closed down altogether.

Joanne Segars, chief executive of the National Association of Pension Funds, said: "Pension funds are deeper in the red than ever, and this extra dose of QE is only going to make things tougher.

"Businesses will be forced to divert more money from jobs and investment into filling black holes in their pension funds. Our fear is that many will choose to close these pensions altogether, further weakening the UK's ability to save for its old age. The Bank's own research shows that QE is harmful to the majority of final salary pension schemes, particularly in the short term."

Inflation

The thinking behind QE is that when the financial institutions sell their gilts, they receive cash to spend on other types of assets such as company shares and bonds. The companies selling the assets deposit the proceeds in their bank accounts, providing banks with a ready source of funding for loans. This could help to reduce the cost of borrowing for businesses and households. The idea is that this should lead to increased spending, helping sustain the rate of inflation at the government's target of 2%.

But there is always the risk it could overshoot this target, forcing the Bank of England to raise interest rates and sell assets to lower inflation again. This would be bad for those on a fixed income, such as pensioners. They suffer a higher rate of inflation than the CPI because a large proportion of their income is spent on food and energy, which have increased in price faster than CPI.

Ros Altmann, director general at Saga Group, believes the damage to pensioners' income through QE is likely to have a bigger impact on spending than the freeing up of money in the economy. She said: "There has been no official assessment of the damage done by QE to corporate and consumer spending via its impact on pension deficits, annuities and income drawdown.

"QE has forced firms to fund their pension schemes and forced over a million pensioners to buy much lower retirement incomes. Low interest rates, high inflation and deteriorating pensions have lowered growth and employment, but the Bank has so far failed to quantify the effects."